Monthly Archives: February 2016

There are entrepreneurs everywhere. Some places have more of an entrepreneur culture while others don’t. The places that stick out in my head as havens for enthusiastic entrepreneurs are Silicon Valley, Boulder, CO, and Texas. I’m not sure what is special about the Silicon Valley intrinsically. It is a place with a lot of people from all over Asia. I’m not sure what it was like before the tech boom. Boulder is a place where mountains meet plains; Where pioneers created a new life; Where there is energy in the air. I can see why Boulder does well as an entrepreneur hub. I spent a few nights there in my life and felt invigorated the next day. The people there have so much enthusiasm and happiness to share with others. They truly have a unique breeding ground for excellence. But, what about Texas?

Texas is a place that is huge. It’s a state that started out as its own country. Some of the local whites formed a militia and stood up to Mexico on several occasions to create this state. The result is that many people died, and that their state incurred a huge pile of debt. Nine years later the United States offered to annex Texas and pay off their debts — and Texas accepted. I just wonder if being in a state that fought to exist against all odds helps you as an entrepreneur. The whole spirit of that state is to create something new in dangerous uncharted territory. It is just like the world of business when you think about it. It’s also cheap to buy land there and the weather is reasonable year round.

Throughout history, many business men have made it big in Texas — really big. Thinking big will definitely help you in business, but thinking really big might help even more. My next road trip is going to be to Texas. Wish me luck and don’t forget to say “Yee-Haw” when I cross the border.

Do you have a friend who is a scatterbrain? Is he constantly rushing around trying to get things done in a disorganized way? The human mind has tens of thousands of disorganized thoughts floating around every day and those thoughts can wreak chaos on your productivity and stress levels.

A person who has regulated thoughts can actually get more work done, prioritize better, be more punctual about the things that matter, and get through the day smoothly. Trademarks of a mentally organized person are a clean desk, a clean house, neat personal appearance, level emotional behavior, and clear communication. Of course in real life, it might not be so clear cut identifying a mentally regulated person, but they are likely to have some of the traits I just mentioned.

So, what is the secret of getting more done every day and getting higher quality work done? Taking time off. Taking a long walk in nature every day refreshes the body and mind and delivers precious oxygen where it is needed. Meditating once or more per day also calms the mind. Other people prefer Hatha Yoga or deep breathing which is also excellent for the mind. Trying to do too much is like trying to drive your car without having an oil change or having a pit stop to refuel and check your tire pressure. Down-time is as important as up-time, but not everybody realizes this. It is also important to have hobbies. Mind-stimulating hobbies can sometimes be the best. I play “Go” or “Wei-qi” which is a Chinese game of strategy. Playing that game activates my mind in ways that my other daily activities do not. Reading a variety of materials or studying a foreign language can also activate different parts of your brain. There needs to be diversity in your daily regime — it cannot be all work and no play or you will become completely out of balance and not function efficiently.

The irony of today’s work world is that the people who try to achieve too much actually get less done. I have seen countless blog articles on the topic, but let’s look at the issue in an international way to make it more interesting.

In business, the more you get done, the more money you make, right?
The modern consensus is that business people are trying to do too much, which causes them to lose track of priorities. An hour spent on a priority during your peak hours of focus might get you a lot more long term revenue for your business than an hour spent doing busy-work. The solution is to make an itemized list of all the tasks you do daily and figure out which ones not to do, and which other tasks you can do in a more efficient way. I am constantly redefining my work routing and getting better at it all the time.

The Asian consensus defies current reasoning
In Asia, the culture demands that you are busy and look busy. Busy is good, not busy is lazy. Taking time off is bad, and having no time to enjoy yourself is a sign of success even though it is accompanied with misery. The country in Asia that puts in the most hours is Korea. However, Korean productivity is horrible. Why is this? They spend too many hours at work without doing much to refresh themselves. They have not enough time for friends and family, meditation, long walks, prayer, or other activities which refresh the mind, soul, and body. The one social activity which they do too much of is going out with the boss and co-workers and having a wild night of drinking which is socially required. The next day they come to work hung over and cannot function properly. Although Koreans put in a lot of hours, they are typically burned out, hung over, and they have been pushed far too hard since age eight to over study, overwork, and have no life. On a brighter note, the Korean government is seeing that over studying and overworking is bad for quality of life and have been creating laws to moderate this culturally detrimental behavior.

Norwegians work the least yet get the most done
In Norway, they work an average of 33 hours per week and have at least 21 vacation days compared to Koreans who work around 43 hours per week and only get 15 paid vacation days per week. Some Koreans do 52 to 68 hours per week too. However, it has been found that the value of an hour of work done by a Norwegian is the most valuable compared to any hour done by an average person in any other country. Somehow the Norwegians know how to make those 33 hours count while the rest of us are just shifting papers around.

So, what are the secrets of these folks in Norway?
I read a bit about Norway and found they eat out less, and have smaller portion sizes. They eat a lot of fish, berries, meat and potatoes. Fish and berries are extremely light and healthy. I’m not so sure about the meat and potatoes though. People in Norway also are more happy to walk to work or ride a bike while the rest of the world gets stuck in a traffic jam breathing in toxic fumes. There is not much pollution in Norway either as they are not that populated, and have a good public transportation system. So, in addition to the high IQ’s that Norway merits, their healthy lifestyle might help their brains be prone to higher productivity. On a more comical note, people are less friendly in Norway, so they probably spend more time actually working instead of gossiping with co-workers or browsing posts on Facebook.

So, how can you get more work done in less time?
It pays to plan your work-time better instead of letting it happen. If you schedule your week or month ahead of time and figure out exactly what needs to be done and how to do it, that will help. Taking walks, breaks, meditating regularly and spending time with friends and family help too. If you maintain your health properly, you’ll be more efficient as well, so don’t drink too much or eat too much heavy foods that slow you down!

I always tell people in business — if you want to get clients fast, offer them a cut rate to begin with. That way they will be likely to try you out. If you do a good job, they will be likely to keep you. But, what if you offered coupons?

What if you offer 50% off for your first project of 10-20 hours of labor? I have a better idea. Offer a groupon. That way if someone has a friend, they can try your service together at a cut rate. That way you are in a sense networking. Or, you could offer groupons to existing clients for specials, so they could drag their friends into being your client.

Groupons grew in popularity with American restaurants several years ago. Instead of offering a discount for a single person, restaurants saw they could get more clients — a lot more clients by getting groups to come in at cut rates. Your outsourcing BPO could do the same. Would it work? It doesn’t hurt to try, and it’s such a fun idea too.

Or you could offer coupons to people to try new services that you offer. If someone is hiring you to do Linked In outreach for them, you could offer them a coupon to try your email newsletter service or some other service.

Remember, with sign up specials, you always lose in the short run, but you might get a client that you keep for five or ten years which will much more than cover for your loss! Think big and think long term!

I was just looking at a graph of top economically performing nations. Ten years ago, India was not on the top ten list. Now it is. Japan on the other hand took a huge economic dive in 2014. I’m not sure what happened, but I read that people in Japan were spending a lot less, and also getting older. Personally, I’m glad that I’m not getting older! China’s growth was astounding despite all of the economic and banking problems they have. I’m not sure how much longer they can keep growing now that there is heavy competition for investments in West Africa which is now the new “place to be” as far as business is concerned.

India’s economy is growing, but their people skills are shrinking
Every time I visit India I am amazed at all the new buildings that were not there a year or two previously. I am also amazed at all of the new cars that have replaced the 1940’s style British Ambassador style sedans which looked so old school (but are great in accidents since the metal is so thick.) However, every time I call India I am also amazed at how pathetically hopeless their phone etiquette is. People are so inept they cannot announce their personal or business name when answering a business call at an office. Additionally, secretaries routinely put you on hold without permission only to be disconnected if you ask them a trick question such as, “what city are you in?” Simple questions requiring a kindergarten education are too difficult for most of India’s staff. So, I believe the solution is training. But, small and even large businesses don’t want to bother with much if any training. So, what is the solution?

Government training
The government of India takes great price in their economic growth and why shouldn’t they. But, imagine how much faster they would grow if they could eliminate some of the stupid behavior that goes on in businesses. High turnover, incompetent phone etiquette, and disorganized management top the list. What if the government could have schools to teach people how to check people’s work, answer the phone, answer basic questions, and stick to a job for more than three months? The entire nation would be turned around! Additionally, if the government would systematically test people from time to time to see how good their work skills are then workers could be given a formal written assessment which could be shared with all employers. I feel that workers that jump from job to job should also be penalized in their government score sheet as job hopping makes it very hard for upper management to run a company.

India’s professional future
Maybe India will one day turn around and learn phone etiquette. But, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Even the big companies hire incompetent secretaries and receptionists. If the best companies who have overseas investors can’t get it right, how will smaller businesses? Perhaps foreigners need to go to India and create some competition. In America, we have twenty nationalities (in large numbers) living under one government. We all compete against each other. Having some competition in India would do their country good. Maybe one day!

Those of us who are smart are concerned with our SEO for our site. A handful of us evey obsess about it. The main thing is that our site will show up well on Google. I recently had a problem where some bad review sites were coming up on the first page of Google when you Google one of my company names. I tried many ways to solve the problem. Posting other high ranking content using Twitter and Google+ had some effect on what showed up on the Google search results. But, the one thing that I did which got powerful results was using my newsletter to link to interesting pages about us and our various new social media accounts. I have a dozen social media accounts for my main site. I am not active on all of them, but I do have a presence.

Keep in mind that my success with the newsletter is not something that came overnight. It took me three years to build my newsletter to having 4300 followers. Additionally, the SEO success from posting links to great content on my newsletter took about a month to show results on Google’s search results. Google doesn’t always like to give instant gratification. They prefer to keep you guessing about what worked and why.

So, if you want to keep your clients close, and get some increased site traffic and have more control over what happens on Google, consider a newsletter. It is a huge investment of time, but it is one of my most powerful marketing channel after Facebook. Facebook is currently giving me 6000 visitors per month to my blog while my newsletter is not far behind at around 4000. Of course these numbers could vary depending on how actively I use them, but for use that I consider to be “moderate” those are the numbers!

All I can say is, “wow,” SEO strength doesn’t come easily, but thank god I have what I call SEO muscle!

Do you run your own business or manage one? Do you screw up? I do too. But, not that often. When I try new things, or am too overwhelmed to be able to attend to things — screw ups happen. Generally the screw up is that the person I hired didn’t do what they were supposed to and didn’t give a damn either. I am too busy to babysit people. So, those that screw up are at the bottom of my list.

So, there are different classifications of screw ups. There are experimental screw ups where you try a new approach and see if it works. If not, you learn something. If you invest too much in going the wrong direction, then you lose big. There are hiring screw ups which are far more common. If you test people out over several months to see if they do good work and don’t lose interest, there will be fewer screw ups. Then there are major screw ups where your data got compromised or you lost a key employee due to an argument that would have better gone un-argued.

My main point of this quickie article is to keep screw ups small. It is okay to screw up, especially during experimentation. In fact, I wouldn’t even call an experiment, or trying something new a screw up if the results weren’t good. I would call it a success because you succeeded in learning what not to do next time. Until next time — I have things to screw up.

In another blog entry, I wrote about a lad in the 1700’s whose elders decided was best suited to be a pirate. That lad was reborn and went to one of the best Chinese hacking schools that existed. Then, he learned the art of market disruption and did startups for a while. After a few years of failed startups, he had his first success — but, the venture capitalists took everything he made. The boy was angry because after all — he was the one who was supposed to be the pirate. But, I guess there is no honor among thieves.

After that, the young man decided that what he really liked was trying to do the modern equivalent of being a pirate like what he was in the 1700’s. He would shoot at other people’s boats. Swing over to their boat on a rope, fight them with swords, tie them up, plunder their gold and other valuables, and then set the ship on fire and watch it burn! His favorite part was waiting til the fire hit the powder kegs and watching the entire ship explode! Arr laddie! Twas a sight to be seen!

So, the man quit the startup business and went into mergers. He drank rum, sang pirate songs and coordinated mergers where the managers of the firm being bought out would all be fired and would go down with the ship. He went a step farther to hire a graphic designer to create graphics of the managers going down with a ship with a flag of their company. He enjoyed this career immensely. Then, he went into marketing for a while and enjoyed finding artful ways to steal the clients from particular businesses and watch them go bankrupt. Arr — the pleasure can’t be beat, even with two pints of rum!

In any case, this is a silly article, but hope you had fun reading it. It’s fun to think about what people would do if they were reincarnated into another time. I was actually a warrior in many of my earlier lives, but I evolved into a healer. From killing people to healing people — what a transition in my soul’s evolution. I no longer do Native American healing like I did in my shaman past lives. But, I do healing on myself. However, the warrior past lives from way back — several thousand years back in many cases seem to help me out in my business career. Business is like war. It’s hard to keep the troops together. So, defeating the enemy is one goal, but keeping your troops loyal these days is an even harder goal.